Disclaimer

Black Dragon is MY Viewer, i decide which feature i want to add and which to remove, i share this Viewer to show the world that user base size is not important, i do rate quality by effort, thought and love put into the project, not some rough estimated numbers. I consider feature requests only if i you can name proper valid reasons i can agree on. It is my (unpaid) time i'm putting into this project, i'm not here to cater to every Joe's desires.

Sunday, April 28, 2013

Notes:

Clean your settings and cache MANUALLY outside of Second Life if you get any problems (as usual). Ask your Google if you dont know how.Loading old presets or using old settings WILL result in your topbar beeing invisible! Enable Autohide Topbar and disable it again to fix this.

Feedback, gimme gimme.

Report anything unusual, may it be flying pigs, green purple or purple green.

Please dont forget to collect your logs when you crash because "im crashing more than in previous versions" doesnt help me, i can only guess its because of 2 things, either SSB/RLVa merge or you having lots of disconnects (maybe caused by the first reason) which results in a crash.

Anyway, short update on what has been done, i fixed alot of your complains (see below), made everything look better (hopefully) and did some cleanup and general UI uplifting everywhere. Next one might be a beta again, depending on if i will continue merging up SSB for the next update or not.

Have a snapshot as excuse for not doing long blogposts explaining the changes.

Changelog:

2.2.0a Alphafixed Search in statusbar not workingfixed Home button in statusbar not workingfixed the topbar beeing hidden right from the beginning with clean settingfixed the statistic bars for the new cloudbar layoutfixed draw distance panel not appearing right below the draw distance iconfixed default shape differing from LL onefixed the high precision sliders and camera preset spinners not refreshing after loading a settings presetadded option to hide IM/Group chicletsadded my partial OPEN-162 changes againadded explanations to the auto visual-mute and derender functionsadded default indicators to high precision paneladded option to enable/disable the cloudbar style (not yet functional)added 2 new loadingscreensremoved Quick Land option from UI Customisation panelremoved OpenGL Compatibility optionremoved Vertex Array Objects optionremoved Old memory profiling optionremoved Vertical Build Floater optionchanged Chat/IM/Group toasts to better match the cloudbar stylechanged the Machinima Sidebar to better match the cloudbar style and prevent it from overlapping with itchanged Blur on Distance increment value to 0.01 for more finetuningchanged and tweaked some labels in UI Customisation for a better look and nicer explanation of what they dochanged, fixed and aligned the old default indicators in lighting and deferred panel to match the high precision oneschanged info button textures to match the cloudbar styletweaked the hiding behavior of the topbar backgrounds so they wont stay visible when we hide the cloudbartweaked old-style topinfo bar for a better looktweaked favorites >>/<< button sizetweaked topbar sliding behaviors a bitcleaned up some topbar code

Wednesday, April 24, 2013

Note:

Make sure you clear settings and cache if problems arise, as usual.

So this is a alpha which is very important as it contains the feared update SSB (Server Side Baking), RLVa is fixed for SSB and should work mostly, i havnt tested SSB yet however and thats exactly what i need.

I need alot of tests and feedback about:

Does RLVa work as intended?
Do you crash more often because of SSB or on SSB enabled SIMs (dont forget the crashlogs)?
How do you like the new topbar (Cloudbar)?
-should it be default, should it be removed, what could be changed etc etc
What do you think about the improved autohiding topbar feature in combination with that new Cloudbar?
Does everything else work as intended?

Changelog:

2.2.0 Alphafixed Names of other participants not appearing with Display Names off and Plain Text Chat History onfixed Glow Lum/Warmth Weight sliders in Lighting panel not workingfixed a long standing issue in all Viewers that causes the TP screen to appear when we TP home while beeing home alreadyfixed llpaneldrawdistance.cpp/h missing from Cmakefixed changing keylayouts causing unchanged buttons to keep their function (Q and X)reenabled the locationinputctrl warning (will have to find another way to fix it)redesigned chatfloaterredesigned the combined topbar, now called cloudbarrewritten the whole topbar autohide code to remember our favoritebar correctly even on disabling the featurereverted the avatar_lad.xml to LL one (temporarly)moved Machinima Sidebar button to the right now that the Sidebar pushes the UI by defaultmerged Server Side Baking basic functionalitymerged RLVa for Server Side Bakingchanged Tone Mapping defaults slightly for more color contrastchanged llpaneldrawdistance to nvpaneldrawdistance, MINE!changed ShowSelectionBeam to control if our editing arm motion is playedchanged RenderShadowBlurDistFactor to 0.08 by default to prevent shadows from becoming blurrier over distancechanged more notifications and offers to aquaintances/contactschanged and improved loadingbar background scaling a bitchanged AFK timeout to unlimited by default (again)cleaned up some comments and unneeded code bitscleaned up and removed some filescleaned up alot of tags and added more tagging/commenting on some functionsremoved lots of help_topic tags in XML (we dont use the internal help)removed alot of gamma correction bits and all kind of options for itremoved help and fix button strings (both unused)removed unused HTML files and folder in skins folderremoved preferences floater XMLsremoved some unneeded icons/textures

Thursday, April 11, 2013

Recently i have been busy with thinking instead of working, i came to the conclusion that something has to be changed in the Interface again. This time i'm thinking about the main User Interface layout which was the default since this Viewer was started. It includes the Statusbar, Navigationbar, Favoritebar, Toolbars, Chiclets, Chatbar, Main Menus and Chat/IM Toast placement.

So...what is it what i want to change on these? They were perfectly fine and designed to take as less space as possible while making the most use of the available space. Well...let me compile some things together...

First off, i wanted to get rid of the whole Status/Navigation/Favoritebar as one, then remove all widgets up there, throw out the Search, Clock, Favorites and the Quickbuttons aswell as the FPS count, they will be reimplemented later. The Navigationbar will be centered, torn off from everything else at the top most place. The main menu will probably stay at the left side, below it there should be a button to slide out favorites. The right side will feature the stats packed together, which would be the Clock, Network Statistics and your FPS, a seperate part will be for your money and below it there will be the Media/Draw Distance/Sound buttons. Last but not least the Quickbuttons will probably moved below the Navigationbar part and those next/previous/home buttons will remain on the left side just like in any browser. Not sure how or where to implement the search right now...

Second major thing i wanted to change is the Toolbars, Toolbars are the areas in which you can place your buttons freely, i wanted to move the bottom one to top, place it aside of the top one and make the top one align left and the bottom one align right, no bottom buttons anymore, the bottom should be totally button free. This habit of having buttons at the bottom is old and annoying, buttons dont belong at the bottom where your character or avatar is centered at camera wise. In other words they overlay your avatar and thats not the point of them, they should not overlay the "important" part of your world rendering.

Third and last major thing i want to change is the whole Chat layout, i want to make the Chatbar fixed at the bottom left, show/hidable via the Chatbutton or Enter, Chat toasts should be more simple, less fancy looking and in generally a bit smaller and more transparent, same for the Chatbar and History, both should be more simple, no floater background, just a black slightly transparent background, plain simple and still providing some look into the world behind it without making it unreadable. Only thing that probably wont be changed much here is the IM system itself aswell as its chiclets, they are totally fine and should absolutely remain there.

What do you think about this idea about redesigning the whole main UI area?

Tuesday, April 2, 2013

User Interface:

I was bored and needed something to do because i wanted to do a new release but somehow...there wasnt enough to show... so i made myself some work and replaced the draw distance slider in the navigation bar with a icon, hover your mouse over it and you will be able to set your draw distance there, in the same move i also removed all options of it, that means you cannot hide this icon, its always there and you wont need to hide it anyway...its small

I also added an avatar count to the world map SIM names, which will also take you into account.

There were some other changes like a fix that made RenderResolutionDivisor stay over logins, which means that if you had Preferences open and logged out, next time you log in everything was still blurry, apart from that i fixed that bold,italic and underlined texts were SLURLs leading nowhere.

I cleaned up some files and removed some unnecessary and none-working functions like the Navbar Layer 2,3 and 4 and removed some files linked to the volume pulldown which doesnt exist in my Viewer anymore.

Server Side AO:

I've implemented all the new LSL commands for the upcomming server side AO changes, they will allow you to replace the animations directly on the server, that means, less lag for everyone, faster reaction times of AOs AND you only need to activate it once (wear it) and then you can just detach it again for the whole login session, right now you have to redo that every login but LL is working on making that stick over logins.
The new commands are:llSetAnimationOverridellGetAnimationOverride llResetAnimationOverridePERMISSION_OVERRIDE_ANIMATIONS